MYTHCOMICS: "THE GREAT OXYGEN THEFT" (THE MARVEL FAMILY #41, 1949)

 For a change, here's a Golden Age story in which the name of its artist is lost to time, but GCD attests that the writer was Otto Binder, known to Fawcett fans as having been responsible for a great quantity of stories about Captain Marvel and his kindred. "The Great Oxygen Theft" is not one of Binder's more celebrated stories, but it merits a little notoriety for rendering elementary-school environmental science into a decent cosmological myth.

  

THEFT wastes no time in setting up the action of this 10-page tale. A radio summons from the evil Doctor Sivana lures the Marvel Family to an unnamed, inhabited world in the star-system of Sirius. Sivana gives the heroes a story about his having reformed and directs their attention to the fact that the world's plant life is almost gone thanks to a plant-killing blight. The inhabitants haven't noticed this mass extinction, but they start paying attention when they start finding it hard to breathe, due to the lack of plants generating oxygen. Sivana then leaves the good guys to sort things out while he jets back to Earth, revealing that he created the blight just to keep the Marvels out of his non-existent hair.

   The Marvels' first task is to save the populace. Mary Marvel purifies the soil of Sivana's poison, Captain Marvel Jr disperses the excess carbon dioxide that has built up in the absence of plant life, and Captain Marvel brings in a glacier of frozen oxygen to give the air-breathers temporary relief.

The Marvels then play Johnny Appleseed, transporting Earth-plants to the Sirius-world. Naturally, Binder doesn't trouble with ALL the scientific niceties regarding the practicality of one world's vegetation adapting to a totally different environment. However, on one of the heroes' trips to Earth, they find that certain areas of their own world have been hit with the plant-blight. Before they even have to wonder if the blight might have travelled back to Earth on their boots or capes, Sivana announced that he's responsible, and that he wants supreme power to keep Earth's plants healthy.

  Since THEFT is as I said just a ten-page story, Binder needed a quick wrap-up, so he cheats a little. Captain Marvel gets the bright idea that just as miners had used canaries to test for bad air inside mines, he and the other Marvels can just pick up a random potted plant and use it to "detect" the presence of plant-poison in Sivana's ship. It would probably made just as much sense for the Marvels to race all around the world until they made a visual sighting of the ship-- which, after all, they all got a look at, back on the unnamed planet. But Binder also knew his audience would like a little ironic touch at the end, in which a villain who poisoned a world's plants gets defeated by the use of another plant. The unknown artist even shows, in the penultimate panel, Sivana "wearing" the potted plant atop his bald head, leading one to assume that some hero "crowned" him with it. THEFT probably violates as many scientific principles as those that it gets right, but the payoff at the end, with the Marvels expressing their appreciation for plants and the order of nature, is not diminished by said violations.    
  

MYTHCOMICS: ["KAGOME'S HEART"] INU-YASHA (1998?)

 I won't devote any time in this essay to detailing the basic setup of Rumiko Takahashi's INU-YASHA serial. I outlined those basics in both of the other essays on this property: THE BLACK PEARL and SECRET OF THE TRANSFORMATION. Further, the long arc I've chosen to label as "KAGOME'S HEART" commences only a handful of installments after TRANSFORMATION, so the INU-YASHA status quo remains largely the same, at least in terms of who's chasing who and the stakes of the seesaw battles of good and evil. 

In my analysis of TRANSFORMATION, I noted that it was made up of two long arcs-- each labeled according to one of the story-titles (according to the Viz translated editions), "The Third Demon" and "Secret of the Transformation." These two had in common Inu-Yasha's progress toward mastery of the magical sword Tetsusaiga, though they were interrupted by three other story-arcs only tangentially related to that theme. I simply chose to use the title of the concluding arc as an umbrella-title for both.

An additional complication is that the story translated "Kagome's Heart" is one of the installments present in the intervening arc "Kikyo's Crisis," in which, to repeat myself, concerns how "Kagome is tormented by seeing Inu-Yasha's feelings for his former lover," i.e., the dead priestess Kikyo, restored to a semblance of life by magic. Takahashi does not devote a lot of space to this "Crisis" arc, for she chose to let the emotions invoked in "Heart" simmer for quite some time, coming to a boil a little while after Inu-Yasha passed one trial by fire, only to face another with regard to the human girl he loves. Below are three illustrative pages from the "Heart" story:

The culmination of the "Crisis" arc is that Kagome tries to resign herself to Inu-Yasha's divided heart, obliging him to love both a living woman and a dead one. HEART-the-long-arc then comes back to this psychological conflict and combines it with the five heroes' efforts to destroy their nemesis Naraku and to gather together all of the shards of the Shikon Jewel. The group's sometimes allies-- Sesshomaru, the wolf-demon Koga, and Kikyo-- also have reasons for pursuing Naraku, though predictably enough Kikyo's entrance will unleash emotions that Kagome has tried to tamp down. As the arc begins, however, the five heroes only know that Naraku has somehow secreted himself so that they cannot find him, either to kill him or to take possession of his stolen Shikon shards. Their only clue seems to lead them to the legendary Mount Hakurei, alleged to have been the dwelling-place by a great monk, Hakushin. But Hakurei is so pervaded with spiritual energy that both Inu-Yasha and Shippo are adversely affected when they come close. So how can the evil Naraku be concealed therein?    

In addition, it's quite evident that Naraku has been busy, for seven dead mortal mercenaries have been restored (via Shikon shards) to undead status, implicitly to run interference for Naraku. Though Takahashi devotes a lot of space to Inu-Yasha's group battling the seven revenants-- each of whom has a deadly specialty-- I'll pass over them quickly, since the warriors are just there to keep up the needed level of spectacle for a shonen series. The revenant who has the most personality is the perverted Jyakotsu, who forms a homoerotic desire for Inu-Yasha, a desire that will only be satisfied when he cuts off the dog-demon's head. However, arguably the dog-demon really gets curbed by Kagome.

For some readers, it might be easy to mistake this scene for just another of Takahashi's many "irate-female-clobbers-insensitive-male" schticks. But there's a deeper dynamic here. In the short tale "Heart," Kagome confesses that she'll try to put aside her negative feelings toward her competition just to remain in Inu-Yasha's presence. But the rash hero wants to be held blameless for any pain he causes her, and that's what unleashes Kagome's ire. She's a woman in love who wants her loved one to be true only to her, and when he reacts to her sublimated resentments as if she had found fault with him, she uses her "sit command" power to punish him.     

 

 Takahashi eventually parallels Kagome's attempts at self-sacrifice with those of the Buddhist monk Hakushin. Once Kikyo manages to access Mount Hakurei, she meets Hakushin, who sought to become a "living Buddha" in order to help others after death. However, self-doubt infected the monk's resolve, and later Naraku suborned him, persuading him to let Naraku stay within the holy mountain. But Kikyo is able to assuage the monk's weakness, so that he's able to find peace.   

However, though the spiritual shield around Hakurai dissolved, Naraku accomplishes his purpose there: splitting off a part of himself, a sort of demon-baby. The baby, later named Hakudoshi, then seeks to take control of Kagome in order to utilize her ability to sense Shikon shards. The evil infant at first can't find darkness within the young girl's heart, until Kagome's negative feelings toward Kikyo come forth. However, even though Kagome feels resentment that Inu-Yasha left her side to search for a missing Kikyo, she successfully resists the demon-baby's spell with her love for Inu-Yasha, moments before he arrives on the scene. 

The spawn of Naraku escapes the hero's retribution, and once he's alone with Kagome, Inu-Yasha swears to never again leave Kagome for Kikyo. However, she realistically judges him to be incapable of deserting his former love-- who of course has further appearances to make in the ongoing series-- but the heroine manages to negate her natural irritation with her complete conviction in her own love. 

The INU-YASHA series takes place in a fantasy-version of Sengoku Japan, where Shinto gods and demons (or fictional versions thereof) intermingle with Buddhist monks seeking to transcend the physical world. I suspect that Takahashi's primary interest was the conflicts of the human heart. This is why, though she's respectful to Buddhist precepts, the artist is more concerned with Hakushin's failure than with his ascension to nirvana. But this is the core of her art, for in the words of G.K. Chesterton, Takahashi is, first and foremost, a poet who's in love with the finite, rather than a philosopher, whose abiding love is the infinite.   

    

MYTHCOMICS: "MOON MADNESS" (THE UNSEEN #7, 1952)

 "Searchers after myth haunt strange far places. They climb to the zenith of the sky in the sun-god's chariot; they descend to the depths of the sea to marvel at pearls the size of houses. They visit islands swarming with prehistoric beasts, or with beasts that walk like men. The shadows of the minarets of Araby conceal for them a thousand treasures. Yet for the true epicure of the mythopoeic, there is no better breeding-ground for the combinatory power of archetypal phantasms than the pages of the humble comic book."-- Happily Phony Lovecraft.

      Just like last year I'm only managing to get one horror-story myth-analyzed this month of Halloween. But IMO this one's a doozy. This forgotten gem from Nedor Publishing has no credited writer, so as I've done in the past, I will impute for simplicity's sake full authorship to the credited artist, Jack Katz, later famous for a multi-issue fantasy I've not yet read, name of THE FIRST KINGDOM. After reading this short horror tale, maybe I'll give his fantasy-domain a closer look.

Katz starts off MADNESS with a bang and barely slows up thereafter. Protagonist Emil Jankow, identified in the opening caption as belonging to the class of "vagrants and hobos," is attacked by a mad dog belonging to a "witch-like creature named Agnes." As Emil faints from his wounds, Agnes uses a pistol to kill the dog, sparing Emil's life. The reader alone hears Agnes ruminate that she won't tell the hobo that her dog was rabid, though in due time it will become apparent that the pooch didn't have garden-variety rabies. Aside from naming her watchdog after the Prince of Darkness and having some allegedly "magic" salves on hand, Agnes doesn't seem especially witchy until she warns the recovered Emil to "stay out of the light of the new moon." That Katz departs from the usual werewolf trope re: the full moon shows that the artist was playing fast and loose with lycanthropic mythology.

The next departure is that Emil's wounds from the dog don't heal in the approved Larry Talbot fashion but instead give him a sort of "Phantom of the Opera" disfigurement. This development makes panhandling a little easier, and so does the very non-rabies effect of his injuries: that all dogs become Emil's friends. This also sets him on a fatal course when he runs across wealthy girl June and her dog Duke, and he instantly charms the bite out of the former member of the K-9 corps. (June doesn't quite say that Duke suffered PTSD because his experiences in the war, but it's a fair extrapolation.) June perhaps tosses out too much information when she goes on about how a local named Kirk Lamarr has been June's personal dog-hating Mrs. Gulch. But it's info the reader needs to know, just like learning that, within a week, Emil falls in love with June and resents her boyfriend Jim.

   Now the experienced horror-reader will expect poor Emil-- who at this point has done nothing bad, only had bad thoughts-- will have an unhappy encounter of the lunar kind. And the transformation of the lycanthropic (caninthropic?) victim is marked by an accidental killing before beginning his own killing spree. But the victim's victim is not of another shape-changer as in THE WOLF MAN, but by a member of the canine species that seemed to recognize Emil as a "big dog" of the pack. Emil accidentally shoots Duke dead, and he decides to conceal the dog's death to avoid blowback. (Katz was careful to show that Duke was not June's only dog, so the K-9's passing doesn't mean Emil would have been terminated.) However, Emil then transforms into a were-creature and immediately pounces on the first "smooth white throat" he comes across. But is he transformed by the moon, or by committing a sin against dog-kind?

Even though Emil wasn't bitten by a wolf (except in the general sense of dogs having evolved from wolves), he thinks of himself as a lycanthrope once he's returned to his human (albeit disfigured) form. Emil learns that that local pain Kirk Lamarr believes that Duke killed Emil's victim, and Emil's attempt to cover up his killing of the dog implicates the dead canine in Emil's crimes of the next few days. (It's interesting that June refers to Duke as a "watchdog," the same term Agnes used for her rabid pooch Satan.) The aggrieved dog-trainer seeks to quell his animal rage by chaining himself in his quarters and tossing away the key. I guess he didn't toss it far enough, because June finds it and unlocks his chains, which practically begs Emil to unleash his demon and attack both June and Jim.

  Improbably, Jim is able to drive off Emil with a mere club. Maybe it works because Emil didn't really want to kill either Jim or June? The couple can't convince dog-hater Lamarr that they witnessed a werewolf, though strangely, within the course of one day, some unnamed professor is able to talk the rest of the town into crediting the reality of werewolves. Said prof even convinces the polity that they don't need silver bullets, just ordinary torches, to kill a werewolf. Did Katz have a thing for all the cinematic scenes where Frankenstein's Monster got repelled by torches? Emil's near the end of his run now, because he didn't transform back this time. He decides to seek another victim in the unguarded town.

And who's one of the few people who didn't join the posse, because he didn't believe in werewolves? Why, it's skeptical smarty-pants Lamarr, though strangely he's not home when Emil invades his house, forcing the were-dog to cool his heels a bit. I assume Katz did this so that Lamarr would arrive at his house just as the posse just happened to return to town. It's surprising that Katz spared the dog-hater's life-- certainly no one who read the story then or now would cared if Lamarr had died. Indeed, killing the enemy of the woman Emil still loved would have given the doomed man one last, slightly altruistic deed before dying. But Jim bursts in and destroys the monster with nothing but a thrown torch. In death Emil not only does not look burned by the torch, his "rabies" disfigurement goes away too. I note in closing that Katz does keep drawing the moon in the sky, though technically a new moon should only last about three days, and it sounds like Emil was "wolfing out" longer than that. But I don't think Katz really cared about the moon-schtick popularized by Universal movies. I think he had a genuinely original take on lycanthropy, portraying it as a curse activated less because of the lunar satellite than because of the cursed man's sublimated failings and/or hostilities. And while MADNESS is not a masterpiece like THE WOLF MAN, Katz's tale seems to be playing with some of the same mythic concepts.           

MYTHCOMICS: "THE LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS" (WONDER WOMAN #149, 1964)

 

In my overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN comics of the 1960s, I asserted that the writer hardly ever made much use of the mythical elements present in the mythos bequeathed to DC by creator William Marston. In contrast to Kanigher's contemporaneous METAL MEN, wherein the author sometimes managed to imbed his juvenile formulas with the substance of epistemological myths, Kanigher wrote as if he thought his readers too simple-minded to care about consistency or elucidation of fantasy-concepts. However, at the end of the essay I added that I found one story that achieved mythopoeic concrescence. True, it's flawed. A lot of time is wasted with a side-plot showing Wonder Woman in her Diana Prince ID, where she has to rescue a rocket crew from disaster without revealing her identity to Steve Trevor. However, one of the corniest elements found in many WW stories of the time actually works to the advantage of LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS. 

I noted in the overview that I was no fan of Kanigher's "Wonder Woman family." a sterile emulation of the Weisinger "Superman family." Back in the Golden Age Wonder Woman was always an adult. Her only family member was Hippolyta, the immortal queen of Paradise Isle, who created her daughter Diana from clay with the help of the Amazons' patron deities Athena and Aphrodite. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, though, Kanigher added to Hippolyta's brood two time-tossed incarnations of Diana, one the teenaged Wonder Girl, the other the toddler Wonder Tot. By 1964, the time of DAY, Hippolyta has evidently grown contemptuous of the perils of time-paradoxes, for all three versions of Diana co-exist on Paradise Isle and have adventures together. They begin DAY with all four Amazons asleep, though all the later scenes are in daytime, so apparently the catastrophe waits until dawn to strike. A massive earthquake strikes the island, and the Amazons have to form a "human chain"-- a favorite Kanigher trope-- to keep Wonder Tot from falling into a chasm.

            

The Amazonian quartet goes outside. Their two patron deities materialize and tell them that Paradise Island is falling apart due to Hippolyta's transgression against Athena's law, that no man may be allowed to tread upon a sanctuary meant only for the immortal Amazons. The presence of a man in Greek armor, "The Prince," is at the root of the trouble, but since Hippolyta insists on explaining how things came to this pass, even juvenile readers would have figured out that DAY is a tale beginning "in media res," which gives Kanigher the chance to start things off with a bang before settling in for a big explanation.

Hippolyta briefly mentions that her unnamed Prince was her consort, if not husband, back in the days before she was granted immortality. However, he was lost at sea and presumed dead. However, because Kanigher also wants to acquaint his readers with the lives of Hippolyta's daughters, the exegesis is delayed so that the reader can see a lot of incidents in the lives of the three Wonders. Eleven pages go by before Kanigher tips his hand. In contrast to all the other stories in which Hippolyta sends her children off to have heady adventures, this time she's haunted by the memory of her lost love. In a nice bit of irony, Wonder Tot swears to stay with her lonely old mother, but then in a short time the child ventures forth to have a one-page exploit with her wacky buddy Mister Genie. 

While Hippolyta's lost prince was never mentioned before this story or afterward, at this time the amazon queen feels her lovelorn state exacerbated by the fact that all of her daughters have interesting, vital lives. So to anneal her sorrow, Hippolyta creates a stone statue of her beloved. But as she goes to sleep-- presumably the night immediately before the earthquake-- she makes the mistake of praising only the sculpting skill lent her by Athena for giving her a semblance of her lost love. By doing this, Hippolyta emulates the act by which she brought her child Diana to life from clay, though without any intention of making the stone come to life.

According to Kanigher's cosmos, though, Aphrodite was responsible for imbuing the clay statue of Diana with life. The love-goddess is affronted that her worshipper Hippolyta would credit Athena with anything concerning love. There's some justice in this. Athena, the virgin war-goddess, is the image on which all of the Amazons have modeled their (presumably celibate) lives. They seem to evoke Aphrodite not with respect to forging romantic alliances-- although both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl are pursued by attentive males-- but with respect to invoking Aphrodite in a vague spirit of beneficence, one that Marston tended to call "lovingkindness." This arrangement seems to have been okay with Aphrodite until Hippolyta credits Athena with anything pertaining to the exigencies of romantic love. This is probably the only time in Kanigher's career that he portrays the Greek gods of the WONDER WOMAN cosmos as being as fractious and petty as they often are in traditional stories.

    

A massive fire-creature sticks his head out of a crevasse, and wonder of wonders, Kanigher actually explains that this is "the God of Earthquakes," whom Athena presumably summoned to devastate Paradise Island. All of the Wonder Family members try to sacrifice themselves to save the other (barely seen) Amazons, and once again they form a human chain to support one another. Aphrodite is not impressed by acts of heroism; she only wants to see a sacrifice rooted in romantic love. The animated statue-- which for all we know might incorporate the long-dead spirit of the Prince-- then gives the love-goddess the sacrifice she wants. Once his intrusive male presence has vanished from the island, Athena is free to cancel the execution, and the goddess leave.

Given that almost every bit of characterization in Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN is annoyingly flat, the conclusion proves eyebrow-raising. The three daughters realize that their mother has lost her only love a second time, and they try to soothe Hippolyta by telling her that they'll devote more time to her. But Hippolyta's last words are those of an aging (and not immortal) parent ceding power to the younger generation, giving them permission to live their own lives, no matter how it isolates her. Perhaps Kanigher allowed himself this isolated moment of sensitivity because mortal men, as much as mortal women, feel time's winged chariot hurrying near. And even an immortal queen, devoted to the battle-ethos of Athena, must satisfy all forms of erotic romance, even in the form of memories, to the exclusive claims of the Goddess of Love.                

MYTHCOMICS: "NAWANDO'S LAST VISION" (RED ARROW #1, 1951)

 

I came across this mythcomic thanks to my having continued to survey Native American comics-characters on my OUROBOROS DREAMS blog. Three issues of a western comic, RED ARROW, were released in 1951 by one of America's smallest comics-publishers, P.L. Publishing. I have not yet read any of the company's other magazines but everything in the RED ARROW series is absolutely ordinary. GCD attributes the art to one Richard Case, of whom I know nothing, except that he was working before another Richard Case, one made famous for working with Grant Morrison, was even born. Since there's no writer credited, I will proceed as I often have before, using the artist's name as if I knew he were the sole author. Whether it was Case or not, someone involved with this forgotten tale brought to it a mythic density that demonstrates the desire to research what was then known of Native American medicine-men rituals.

   Although the story's action is set in 1876, it might have just as easily set in the pre-colonial days of the continent, for there are no indications of the influence of European colonists upon the shaman Nawando or any of the Native Americans. The opening caption claims that only Nawando can speak to animals, yet many pre-colonial tales show animals freely conversing with all human beings, to say nothing of intermarrying with them. Here, Nawando feels a great vision approaching, so he isolates himself from his tribespeople. The mountain he seeks is guarded by a serpent who claims that the domain belongs to the dead, but one of Nawando's allies casts the serpent aside. 

Nawando's vision allows him (and the readers) to peer in on the life of a discontented young fellow named White Bull, who lives in a pueblo "far across the desert." The distance may not have been all that great, given that the Southwestern lands of the Navajo, the Pueblos, and their neighbors the Apaches bordered one another. But the main focus of the vision is not to show where White Bull is, but what he does, and what he does is to predict that he will never settle down and become a commonplace householder. Two pretty maidens think White Bull is too conceited, removing himself from the tribe to sit out in the wilderness at night, so they set a trap, a hole for the young brave to fall into so that he'll be duly humiliated.

Though some readers might expect this contrivance to end with some romantic hookup, this idea is ended when Case has the two mischievous maidens captured by marauding Apaches, "never to return to their people." White Bull for his part takes his ordeal in stride, simply meditating in the pit despite hunger and circling vultures. He seems to understand now that he's on the cusp of becoming a medicine man himself, though he doesn't know he's now being watched by a full-fledged spirit-guide. Nawando's vision ends and he prepares to go to the aid of "a son in deadly danger."

Nawando and his animal friends cross the desert, but again they meet malign creatures who apparently just don't like foreign shamans trespassing on their territory. But all of the inimical forces are circumvented thanks to the medicine-man's allies.

  Then a storm comes up, as if signaling the opposition of the heavens as well. However, Nawando decides to simply face the tempest, assuming an attitude of acceptance much like that of White Bull, saying "I go to meet the Great Spirit." But by chance or design the tornado-like turbulence drops Nawando and his allies right near the pit of White Bull, so that they are able to rescue him. And in the arguably rushed conclusion, White Bull receives his new status as the future "seer of visions" (though without stating which tribe he'll be seeing visions for, and without going through years of metaphysical training). Nawando announces that he's happy to let his figurative son succeed him, for he's ready to retire to his cave in the mountains. He doesn't say he anticipates death, though the serpent does claim that the mountains-- at least the only ones we've seen-- are the domain of death.

And so Richard Case rendered to his few readers a quixotic take on how visionary seers propagate their line by reaching out to similarly gifted individuals who also stand outside the normal travails of birth, marriage and death. It's also worth mentioning that although White Bull doesn't intentionally become isolated inside the pit made by the malfeasant maidens, some shamans in various cultures have been known to seek enlightenment within such declivities-- whether it's to get away from people, to get closer to the earth, and any number of similar reasons. Also, in terms of imagery a pit would be gendered as feminine, and from page 3 on it's evident that the aspiring shaman plans to reject that path for the sake of the illumination of "higher" visions.   

      
   
        

MYTHCOMICS: "DEUS EX MACHINA," ANIMAL MAN #18-26 (1989-90)

 

  

The latter half of Grant Morrison's run on ANIMAL MAN wasn't originally given any particular title. However, by whatever contrivance, when DC issued its first softbound reprints of the title, they distributed the first half over two volumes, probably with supplemental material, while the latter half finished up in Volume 3, given the title of the last Morrison story, "Deus Ex Machina."

The first half of Morrison's ANIMAL MAN is a good basic reboot of the late sixties DC character, who in his original incarnation had never taken off. The first seventeen issues emphasize the attempts of Animal Man, who possesses the power to emulate the abilities of all animals, to fight for justice but also to care for the wife and children he maintains in his "Buddy Baker" identity. Morrison also invests Baker with a passionate protective feeling toward the many lower animals maltreated by uncaring human beings, and the author succeeds in making this moral point without becoming preachy. The early issues include a lot of guest appearances by familiar DC heroes and villains. Moore's SWAMP THING and Gaiman's SANDMAN had pursued a similar course to attract regular DC readers. However, the latter half of MACHINA is devoted to doing a deep dive into the DC cosmos rather than emphasizing the main hero's milieu-- and on top of that, a deep dive into the concept of metafiction.

Issue #18 foregrounds a storyline hinted at in the first half: the nature of Animal Man's powers. He meets academic James Highwater and the two seekers go to the desert and chew peyote to bring about a "vision quest." Highwater relates Animal Man's powers to the "morphogenetic fields" suggested by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake (whose work, BTW, I also admire). From a vulpine oracle named "Foxy," the seekers also learn of an impending "crisis," which is Morrison's metafictional reference to the 1985 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. This in itself is a form of metafiction, given that the CRISIS over-wrote established DC continuity so that almost no one remembers the events of that cataclysm. What Morrison plays with is something of an "anti-CRISIS" as he begins bringing back all the untidy fictional creations that the 1985 event sought to banish.

 

However, Buddy Baker's experience goes even farther than CRISIS. Not only does Buddy meet the 1960s incarnation of Animal Man, whose existence was rebooted to make Morrison's version, he also beholds the audience that's reading his comic book. Further, Original Animal Man's rants about how their creators "twist and torture" their fictional creations are borne out when Buddy gets home and finds his family slaughtered by an assassin.

     

For three issues, Buddy puts metaphysics on hold as he seeks out the men responsible for the killings, though later he'll conclude that the real murderer is his writer, Grant Morrison. Issue #23, entitled "Crisis," shows how the Psycho Pirate-- one of the few characters from the 1985 series who remembered how reality had been structured before-- begins summoning all the banished characters from whatever conceptual limbo they occupied. However, he also summons bizarre alternate forms of famous DC characters, all calculated to reflect the "grim and gritty" trend of eighties superhero comics. 

In issue #24-- graced by an evocative cover that celebrates the birth of DC continuity in the Silver Age-- Animal Man defeats the immediate menace of Overman and his purification bomb, satirizing current tastes for "realism." But the hero still wants to know what entity is responsible for the deaths of his family, so he's sent to the limbo of cancelled comics-characters.  

Unsurprisingly, in limbo Animal Man meets a lot of characters who simply ceased to be published, rather than being banished in the 1985 CRISIS, such as The Inferior Five, The Green Team, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and (as seen above) The Gay Ghost. Though Morrison naturally only shows characters from DC or from companies DC acquired, he implies that the same limbo awaits other companies' failed icons, in his amusing line about "the great ruined cities of Atlas and Warren." (Atlas Comics ceased operation in the 1970s while Warren Comics went into bankruptcy in 1983-- though not all of Warren's characters were relegated to limbo.) 

 

As I've already stated, the architect of Animal Man's many torments is his writer on ANIMAL MAN the comic, and he only engineered the hero's sufferings for the sake of "drama." After spending the rest of the last issue outlining for the hero the absurdity of superheroes in the author's "real world," he concludes by expressing dismay at how reality has invaded fantasy. He vanishes and Buddy goes back home, where he's given one last gift by his author: a "reboot" in which Buddy's family never died at all. (I didn't regularly read the comic after Morrison left, but I suspect that this escapist fantasy probably ensured that subsequent authors left the Bakers unmurdered, since such a development would have been seen as thoroughly predictable.) 

And so ended one of the early runs that made Grant Morrison a popular comics-author. I don't agree with his implication that human beings create fictional characters solely to torture them, and I rather doubt Morrison really believes that himself. Indeed, everything that Real Author Morrison tells his readers may have exactly the same status as what Fictional Author Morrison tells his fictional hero-- that it's all done for the sake of a good story.